Happy New Year: five reasons your digital rights will continue to erode in 2014

2014 is upon us and Wired.co.uk has decided to look ahead at what the future may hold... and it doesn't look good. Here are our five reasons why your digital rights are in serious danger of being further compromised in 2014.

1. Default blocking of content by Internet Service Providers

Advertisement

Amazingly, this has already happened and looks to only get worse as we enter the new year. The government's bright idea was to restrict certain types of potentially offensive or harmful websites from vulnerable and impressionable minds by encouraging ISPs to filter specific content by default. This includes, but is not limited to, websites that contain content tagged with dating, fashion and beauty, pornography, obscenity and esoteric material -- which is basically every website ever.

The filters got off to an appalling start, letting through some hardcore porn websites and blocking sex education and rape crisis domains, domains which were created specifically to protect the young and vulnerable, the same demographic the government ironically claimed to be helping with their new filters. The Washington Post rightly described the UK's ISP filtering systems as creating "some of the strictest curbs on pornography in the western world" and there has been widespread outrage across the internet.

Read next

Netflix app not working? Your phone may have been blocked from the service

The filtering shows no sign of stopping, with TalkTalk, Sky and BT already on board and Virgin set to switch their filters on by January 2014. Whilst this is still currently voluntary, legislation to enforce filters has not been ruled out, with the current government pushing for such a law in July 2013. Make no mistake, this is the thin end of the wedge and your rights are going to become a lot more restricted in 2014 unless more is done to stymie the process.

2. Further restrictions on mobile internet

Advertisement

Ever tried to check out that funny picture on Imgur your friend forwarded to you on your phone, only to be presented with a warning screen explaining you'll need to call your tariff to turn age restricted material on? Well, be prepared for that to get much worse.

This inadvertent blocking is known as

'overblocking' and with the filters on standard ISPs coming into play, which are in many ways much stricter than those found on mobile phone networks, you can almost guarantee that the tariffs will match their ISP counterparts with comparably absurd filtering methods.

Read next

Cory Doctorow dreams of a DRM-free utopia – so he's suing the US government to get it

ByRowland Manthorpe

If you feel there are websites unnecessarily blocked on your phone, you can visit Blocked and file a report. Although their own warning doesn't fill us with confidence on the efficacy of filing such a report: "Please note that this form submits the report to Open Rights Group, which helps us monitor mistakes. However, we cannot get mistaken blocks fixed. You should also complain to your mobile operator about the mistaken block".

Advertisement

BT's filters, which are now on by default

Deku-shrub/Wikimedia

3. Further restrictions on public Wi-Fi

Public Wi-FI is great, and the fact we're fortunate enough to live on a very small island means the UK should really have blanket Wi-Fi coverage very soon. Public Wi-Fi is also incredibly intrusive and is now, thanks to an unsettling agreement between the government and the private sector, almost entirely controlled by just five companies: Arqiva, BT, Sky, Nomad Digital, Virgin and O2.

If you thought overblocking was bad on your mobile network or with your ISP, you've not seen anything yet. There have been numerous complaints that certain gay and LGBTI websites have been blocked, which has caused those affected to assert that such filters are in breach of the Equality Act 2010.

So if you're gay or associate yourself in any way with the LGBTI community, you have the pleasure of starting 2014 knowing that, in the eyes of whomever it is that controls public Wi-Fi filtering you're, at worse, something unpleasant, obscene, harmful or sexual that needs to be kept away from children or at best, a filter category oversight that companies forgot to consider.

Dreamed up by Theresa May, presumably after having taken censorship advice from Kim Jong-un, the draft legislation proposes the requirement of UK ISPs and mobile phone operators to keep records (excluding the content) of every individual's browsing activity, which includes: social media, email correspondence, voice calls, internet gaming, and mobile phone messaging services. The data would be stored for 12 months at a time before being destroyed and refreshed.

The cost of this bill would be around £1.8 billion and won't help anyone with anything. May wanted to see it introduced by 2013 and enacted as law by 2014. Fortunately, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg withdrew his support for this bill in April 2013, which means it's not likely to see the light of day in its current form, but brace yourself, a "revised" version is no doubt in the works.

5. "Extremist" websites may be blocked The Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, run by the Metropolitan Police, has the power to issue removal requests for websites they personally deem to be in breach of the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/11" target="_blank">Terrorism Act 2006</a>. Even if we forget that subjective regulation is being carried out based on a rushed and outdated bill that is both controversial and, according to some <a href="https://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/media/press/2005/alarm-as-terrorism-bill-rushed-through-parliament.php"

Advertisement

target="_blank">political pressure groups</a>, an undue imposition on civil liberties, this is still slightly troubling.

It is troubling because this referral unit is unprecedented in its extra-judicial attitude to combating online extremism, favouring an unusual proactive approach to online law enforcement, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/27/ministers-order-isps-block-terrorist-websites"

target="_blank">instead of a reactive one</a>. How can such a relatively small institution decide categorically what is and isn't extremist without getting it wrong occasionally? There are lots of vile, extremist opinions out there, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're illegal. If we're not careful, freedom of speech could suffer greatly.